Corvos
12d ago
One think to look into is prefills - writing the first part of the AI's answer for them and then letting them 'continue' it. It's quite good for overcoming the more mind-killing varieties of fine-tuning that the big players use. Generally used for overcoming censorship but I think probably also good for directing approaches to problems, etc. For example, "Hmm, I should think about this very carefully, it's important I don't get it wrong" or "Oh, that's easy. Just...".
Corvos
13d ago
Partly I think female friendship is closer, more emotional and less contingent than male friendship. Partly of course grandchildren are family and that makes a big difference compared to tfwngf incelish guys.
Corvos
13d ago
nobody wants to self destruct
I think you’re wrong about this. Many people lean into their problems rather than out. Sometimes because - as cope - they convince themselves that they’re self destructing in order to live up to their ideals and then self-destruct harder to prove it. Sometimes because they sabotage themselves rather than risk failure with no excuse.
Corvos
14d ago
I would second The Colour Out of Space. Lovecraft himself considered it the finest of his works, and I think it's a purer example of purely Lovecraftian horror compared to some of his other works.
Corvos
16d ago
I read the three volumes of Worth the Candle that have been published on Kindle. It’s interesting but somewhat flawed - the main storyline doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere, partly because
Corvos
18d ago
There's AI and there's AI. People detection is a simple matter which you can do on-chip. Anything like
Automated trucks for logistics, all coming from automated factories. That's all eminently possible with 70% unemployment, plus more exotic stuff like satellite swarms spying on everybody in real time, decapitation strikes with novel nerve agents we can't even detect.
in the next 5-10 years, like automated coding or automated logistics, is going to be heavily relying on a handful of APIs (approx 4 now) provided by a handful of companies. China could shut down LLMs in China tomorrow if it wanted to - firewall OAI and Anthropic, close down Deepseek. Boom, done. America would have a slightly harder time but it's basically straightforward.
Neither wants to, yet. But if the societal disruption starts to become uncomfortable, they can and they may well. I'm not talking about evil AI, I'm talking about obvious and destabilising social disruption. More than immense wealth and power, governments like stability. China and America are quite capable of running private military AI research on things like YOLO whilst mutually deciding that giving public/corporate society access to AGI is too disruptive to tolerate.
Corvos
18d ago
Also Battlestar Galactica. I think a number of events in the 00s combined to make it clear that we hadn't got answers to all of our problems - the 2008 financial crisis, 9/11 and the inability to turn a theocratic Islamic state into a liberal Western one. Environmentalism. These problems were huge but obviously totally unsolvable by ordinary people.
Also, people were bored. Nobody wanted to hear that we had solved everything and we just had to a) wait for laissez faire economic growth to solve all our problems and b) accept that anything which wasn't solving itself just had to be that way. They/we wanted change and adventure. I always think that was a big part of the response to Covid - people were longing for a Big Problem in which we could all Do Our Part.
Corvos
18d ago
I'm thinking of the
massive, gamechanging social and economic disruption
case, where say 70% of people become unemployed or suffer a sharp reduction in status. I don't like mass migration either, or the repeal of the death penalty, but the opposition to those is ~50% of the population max and most of those are pretty wishy washy about it. Governments hate disruption more than anyone, if too much happens too fast I can entirely see the government just bringing the hammer down, like China did with Ma. There's nothing technologically inevitable about cloud-based AI remaining available. And once it looks like one side of the China/America divide might start dialling this stuff down, I can well imagine their opposite number gratefully following suit.
In short, government with unanimous popular backing is still the biggest beast out there. IF it comes to the kind of unemployment figures above, I think AI companies will bend the knee or be broken. Obviously, if things remain as they are, the future is much more murky.
Corvos
18d ago
Depends heavily on your field. I made a minor move in my job a while ago: the old field fell under Computer Science and it was traditional for all research to be put on Arxiv, and the new field is almost the same but falls under Engineering and so everything good is gated behind IEEE. SciHub finds most papers before 2020 or so but not many after that and it's causing me serious trouble.
Corvos
18d ago
Presumably, if one wanted to, one could just firewall the main API servers. The big players are well known and with the possible exception of full-size DeepSeek, local models are not powerful enough to be very useful.
I’m not in favour of it, but I don’t think there’s anything stopping a majority voting for this. The only reason AI hasn’t been stomped on is the arms race and the fact that overwhelmed first world countries like the UK see it as the key to getting back in the black. Neither of this are immutable facts of the universe.
Corvos
19d ago
The Israel/Palestine conflict is concrete and producing real deaths, whereas environmental issues are speculative and we’ve had them around for a while now.
Even for really serious environmentalists, the world has demonstrably failed to end for a while now. Whereas tens of thousands of Gazans really have died and more are being starved. It’s no wonder it inspires people to greater efforts.
(Of course, other concrete horrors happen all the time but people hear much more about Israel/Palestine for path dependency / antisemitism / whatever reasons.)
Corvos
20d ago
step on Elsevier's toes, you will have a bad time as soon as you set foot in the US.)
I cannot believe that America or any other country is stupid enough to take action against SciHub. Where do they think all the startups they are trying to nurture get their research from?
Corvos
24d ago
This chagos episode recontextualises the tariff deal with britain for me. I did not understand why britain would agree to such terrible terms, maybe it meant britain was weaker than I thought, but now I realize it‘s just starmer being happy to always give in at whatever terms the other side offers.
Hypothesis: Like America, Britain has a constant war between the isolationists and the anti-isolationists. Labour under Starmer are anti-isolationist and so enjoy collaborating with other countries as much as possible, mostly regardless of the actual cost-benefit to the UK.
Corvos
25d ago
Really? I used to read High Life in the Spectator but I always thought the character was made up. Life stranger than fiction, I suppose.
Corvos
29d ago
I think these feelings arise because we eliminated these external causes of suffering and so we are left with the internal ones. It's the difference between a house battered by winds and one with rotting foundations. When you eliminate all external causes for your unhappiness, you are left with the fact that there is simply not much capacity for happiness within you. The starving can hope for food, the plague-ridden can hope for healing, but what do you do when you have everything you could realistically want and you don't enjoy it?
Part of it also is that huge chunks of our lives no longer have tangible, close-time reward. We train for fifteen years before we can hope to get any value of that training for ourselves. It's only natural to long for respite, and the gap between longing for respite and longing for death is not so large.
Corvos
1mo ago
OP said
It has only two possible outcomes: maximal woke virtue signaling competition to derive somehow moral superiority from talking about horrible things your grandparents have done (a la Germans) or Balkan-style history fights because if you are aware of any history beyond John Oliver sketches then you know that events don’t occur for no reason.
Those seem to me classic examples of OP’s first case. Modern Germany defines itself (negatively) in relation to the Nazis, while Australia and Canada are constantly weeping performative tears (and arson campaigns, cancellations, affirmative action etc.) on behalf of the ‘genocided’ peoples.
Corvos
1mo ago
For sure. I’m just saying that I don’t think the first approach is actually viable and I can’t remember seeing any examples, except when the genocide is centuries old and long forgotten except by revisionist historians. Can you think of any examples?
But in practice the first is much harder than the second. Telling someone, “Yes, my ancestors killed millions of people not very long ago, but I choose not to let it define me,” is very difficult, especially if your conversational partner is related to the people they murdered.
It’s much easier to say, “nah, that stuff’s all exaggerated,” or as e.g. the SNP do, “no, you don’t understand, all that British Empire stuff was the evil hateful ENGLISH really, they oppressed us too, please don’t look at any of the Mac names on the memorials…”
Corvos
1mo ago
That’s hugely excessive. A slightly clunky conversation struck up at the wrong moment is not the same as harassment.
Corvos
1mo ago
€8000 seems like quite a lot of money for 1/3 of your classmates to toss away, though. I’m surprised.
Corvos
1mo ago
My understanding is that in Europe university is free and therefore much more ad-hoc than in UK and US where it’s a massive investment.
I’ve always thought it sounded like a good system but haven’t had a chance to try it.
@self_made_human, how are you getting on with the new PC?
I actually copied your specs, on the basis that you seemed like someone who knew what he was talking about, and I'm liking it very much but I need a proper monitor. You were going to get an OLED TV rather than a conventional monitor - did you? And if so, what do you think of it?
EDIT: apologies for the repost, I had the wrong Tinker Tuesday.
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